OTOY Forums

Dear friends
Its a long time I don't make a comparison with the best commercial rendering software.
Probably you know I love gpu computing and my rendering pipeline is based mostly on two rendering engines: Octane and Vray
I never used iRay, only for tests but I can say that is the worst rendering engine that I ever tested!

I created a simple scene to check caustics.
I did this test to check Thea Presto features and I extended the test to all the other software that I own.

My conclusions are:
Octane render with PCM kernel is the best rendering engine for your gpus.
Thea Render is ok too, very fast but is not comparable to the quality of Octane, it lacks some caustic effects, it's flat or clamped.
Arion Live 2.1 is a good software but the new 2.5 release will generate faster and noiseless caustics (Chema posted a lot of examples)
Vray 3.0 has the worts rt support but on the cpu side it rules.

Octane PMC quality is comparable to the CPU kernels that we found in Thea.

The best Octane feature is interactivity and stability with your gpus. You can change your materials, lights, animations in realtime without wait one second.
All the other software use Activeshade frame buffer and We know that Activeshade sucks.
That's why Octane runs at the speed of light.
Otoy and Karba did a masterpiece.

All tests are made with 4 GTX580s, 16 bounces and cooked for 120 seconds.

regards

Hi Gabriele, thank you very much for sharing your research with us. I was waiting for any good comparison between the best GPU renderers.
Have you got any comparison using an interior scene? Maybe with some ies lights? That would be really helpful I think. Thanks

BTW, I notice that you wrote "octane 1.8 PMC"... Did you mean 1.2 version? Or maybe you're testing another version?

Best

Julio

i think it's octane for max version 1.18 wich is the same as 1.2.

I haven't used Thea, but iRay is very good at caustics. Multiple times faster than Octane.
Here's an iRay test i made a while ago with my old 560's. It was rendered under 2 min per frame.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoUqZaCi6AU&feature=c4-overview&list=UUpPxNKT4tigNRAeFmR4mmkQ[/youtube]

Suv

I updated the comparison:

Thea 1.2 970 and MC with no clamped output.

Octane and Thea PT produce the same result (16 bounces)

I didn't know about the clamp feature, in some cases is useful because it limits caustics noise.

No news about Arion 2.5 then Arion is the worst.

Vray GPU doesn't generate caustics.


regards

Tank you for the comparison. I am also using booth vray and Octane, but rarely rt. I may be wrong but rt do caustics. Only the translusent caustics is on by default. Check it in the standard vray global illumination setup.
Best
Daniel

Not GPU but I would love to see Maxwell Render too. It claims to be the most realistic unbiased engine.

I wonder all the time I see such images the differency. If it is unbiased it should look the same, shouldn't it?

Hey great to see some tests here.
As I only own Octane as GPU Renderer I really asked my self how it compares to other professional engines!

Another comparison to Maxwell would be nice. But I´d wait for the new Version 3.0 release they are teasing at their side.
It may come with GPU support also.

I think Next Limit is a bit behind with it´s engine regarding GPU capability and also pricing.
Comparing it with the priceof Octane and the recently adjusted pricing of Random Control´s Arion its very expensive!

Thanks again for the nice Tests!

Cheers,
Raphael

It comes! But only for Multilight feature. Not rendering in 3.0. It still uses FIRE.
The thing with Maxwell is that most productions just use one of the wide avaiable render-farm services.

The typical Maxwell user seems to picture himself as an elitist user with a smile if it comes to GPU rendering. 90% of all clients won't notice a caustic rendered with GPU or CPU.

Corona render?